My fellow writer and friend, Brad, will not share his mantra with me. It’s private, something he discloses to no one else. In any event, this mantra is not made up of words but rather of sounds. My friend uses these sounds to anchor his daily meditations.
The name I use here is not his real one. Quite understandably, Brad wants me to use a pseudonym and to keep his identity secret. Though one of his most important activities, meditation remains something he considers deeply private. He honors me in sharing details about this activity so precious to him.
Morning and evening, for the last 16 years, Brad has been meditating. Each of his sessions lasts about 20 minutes, time that he considers extremely well spent. What he values most is the way meditating relieves stress. His work is demanding and he looks forward to this routine that enables him to stay calm even under pressure.
“You hit the pause button,” he says, explaining how he gets rid of the stress that accumulates during the day.
Strangely enough, meditation for him also relieves boredom. It gives an edge to daily life, he finds, that counteracts the feeling he often experiences of some activities not being interesting enough to hold his attention. “It’s like taking a shower, you don’t see this as boring. Instead, it’s refreshing and you experience the benefits all day long.”
After summoning up the mantra, getting into the meditation is easy. “It’s largely a question of sitting quietly and closing one’s eyes.” When thoughts arise, Brad does not fight or resist them but simply returns to the mantra. Thus “the mind kind of settles down this way, leaves disturbances on the surface and the mind sinks into these greater states of calm.”
In his meditation, Brad tries to avoid thought. Yet, as with everybody else, this highly experienced contemplator finds distracting thoughts an almost constant presence. These pesky intruders fly into his consciousness unwanted but Brad knows by now how to handle them. What he does is to return to his mantra, those sacred sounds that keep him on track.
Rarely does Brad meditate with other people. That is because the Transcendental Meditation center where he got his start is no longer housed nearby. But he does attach a special value to doing it with others.
“When you practice with even eight others, there is an absolute palpable difference in the quality of the silence,” he says. “There is a multiplier factor – we’re able to affect each other’s consciousness – without any verbal exchange at all.”
Brad does not regard his kind of meditation as a form of prayer. Rather he relates it to health. In fact, he considers it the most important single thing he does for his health. It affects your physical body, he says, by reducing the stress factor.
He feels the effects of meditation every day: “It’s harder to knock me off my horse,” he reports, “much harder to disturb or upset me, not that I’m unable to be upset by any event.”
Asked whether his kind of meditation has anything to do with God, Brad gives a sophisticated answer. You don’t need any belief in God to practice it; this meditation can be a purely secular activity.
But, on second thought: “In my case it’s a vehicle that I can use to get in touch with the divine aspects within oneself.”
Does that make it religion? “Not religion as taught with dogma or theology, but opening up an aspect in one’s own experience that could be connected with larger consciousness and a larger sense of self.”
This opening can lead to a unity with the divine, Brad believes. “One long respected version of spiritual life,” he says, “is the destiny of the human being is to become God. You can do in your own life what brings you closer to the divinity your own life.”
At the end of the discussion Brad returns to meditation as a hedge against boredom. “That’s important,” he emphasizes, “ because I was able to keep it up.” For him to have continued this practice so long, it had to be intriguing enough. And he holds firmly to meditation as a fascinating and deeply rewarding human activity.
Richard Griffin